We all came here in harmony from Oneness, all perfect, to be loved and nourished, and will return one day unconditionally loved—just as we are.

We connect to this love within when we overlook our differences and see it in others. When we extend love’s qualities to all those we meet.

In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching we are told how we are all a precious expression of the Tao. How we are all cherished:

Every being in the universe

is an expression of the Tao.

It springs into existence,

unconscious, perfect, free,

takes on a physical body,

lets circumstance complete it.

… … … …

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.(1)

Most of us have lost that connection to the unconditional love and the comfort, protection, and cherishment that is our inheritance.

Humanity’s history has caused the spark to go out. But the memory of who we are and what we came from lingers in our soul. On our hearts.

We sometimes get inklings of it. Reminders. From a loved one. The wonder of nature. A child’s smile. Beautiful art works. Music that moves us.

That lost memory has caused longing within us. We long to be loved. Cherished. Protected.

Deep within us we know we are supposed to feel these things. Have them. So, we reach for them! We look for them in areas that do not ultimately fulfill us. We pursue success. We seek respect. We look to all kids of pleasures – that sometimes turn to addictions.

And we seek love from others. But since most of us are not connected to the love within, we cannot fulfill the other’s void. We disappoint each other.

This article/blog post is based in concepts from my book “Your Journey to Peace … “

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We connect to the love within by embracing what brings us joy. Makes us feel peaceful. Passionate. And by extending love’s qualities (compassion, understanding, acceptance, etc.) to others it rekindles that spark of love within us.

Embracing Our Oneness – Seeing Our Sameness

Resolving our conflicts and making peace with our differences and the resulting judgments that stem from these – whether with individuals or groups of people – allows us to move closer to our wholeness, align with our godliness, and encourages us all to embrace the Oneness we all share.

We must focus on our sameness. For those of us with issues toward anybody different than us, whether because of race, creed, social status, or sexual preference, we have an opportunity to forgive ourselves for judging and for not seeing them as the masters intended us to see our brothers and sisters, namely, as perfect children of God.

For those of us who are being judged and have or are living with the pain and unfairness of prejudice, we have the opportunity to forgive those who judge, condemn, or create the inequalities we are enduring or have had to endure.

When our beliefs come from the narrow interpretations of scriptural writings – like “my religion or belief system is better than yours,” or, when we focus on word-for word-translations and for example, deem homosexuality a sin, we have lost the original intention of the messages. We are coming from a place of judgment. Not unconditional love.

Our scriptures were inspired, but came through the lens of the people at the time who were very judgmental and who also projected the darkness they held within themselves onto others.

There are many wonderful insights within the ancient scriptures and they hold wonderful energy that can uplift us. Bring us peace. Keep us centered.

We just have to remember that the true purpose of all the ancient scriptures is to help us reconnect with the Tao – and extend to others God’s love – the love that we came from and that is still within us.

We more easily access this love within when we extend it to others. When we allow judgement to override compassion, unconditional love, and full acceptance of others, how they practice their faith or who they are being, we are not reconnecting with the Tao – with God’s love.

We are not practicing our godliness or really adhering to the core message of our belief systems – which is seeing the perfection in all others and offering them acceptance and unconditional love – just as the Masters offer to us.

https://yourjourneytopeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Image-article-tigers-in-white-backgrouond-...-591359__340.jpg340527Rosemaryhttps://yourjourneytopeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rosemary-logo.pngRosemary2018-07-28 13:18:072018-08-04 20:11:04The Tao Birthed Us and Always Looks After Us

Summer is the perfect time to rediscover – or to discover for the first time – what makes us feel really good. To rebalance ourselves if we have become overworked, overstressed, or being overly busy.

Summertime Encourages Us – Out of Doing – and Into Being

Our busy lives often cause us to lose track of our priorities. Get booged down in work, commitments, and schedules. This often leaves no time for relaxation. To just be. Able to feeljoy. To baskin the contentment of our lives or what we have accomplished. Tofind awe in all the magical things life has to offer. We often become unbalanced. (See below for link to full message)

Our mind / intellect was intended to be a tool that serves the right side of the brain – where creativity and inspiration come from. To follow through on the ideas that come from the right-brain. However, it has taken front stage. Become more important. Society supports this left-brain way of going about life. Of doing.

We usually have no awareness that our doing is coming from our mind. Often, we simply get trapped in business.

Business lures us away from being in the moment. The subtlety of joy cannot be felt. Inspiration doesn’t get through.

When we stay focused on the task at hand – get lost in it – whether a work project or an artistic endeavor we are in our heart-space.

When we allow ourselves to become scattered and rush around in the business of what we are doing we often get caught up in any chaos that develops. Our emotions may run amuck. We feel like we are running on empty. These are clues that our mind has taken over.

Being in the moment requires us to be in our heart-space. This is the seat of our soul. Where we get our guidance. Where our inspiration comes from. Being in our heart-space allows us to feel joy.

We can be doing while being, but the doing must be done with reverence. Concentrating on the task at hand. Reveling in it. Finding joy in it. This is how we bring reverence into our every-day lives. For example, playing with the soap bubbles when washing the dishes brings a sense of childlike joy to the job. We are in our heart-space.

When we do not bring full focus or reverence to our tasks, we are more likely to fall into left-brain mind traps. Mind chatter. Loss of concentration. Scattered unfocussed thoughts. We lose the connection to our heart-space.

Our mind / intellect is supposed to be a tool that follows through on what our inner guidance inspires us to do. However, for most of us our mind / intellect has been running the show ̶ with the right brain and its creative impulses at the beck and call of the mind.

Gaining control over our emotional landscape will help our mind chatter and unfocused thoughts lessen, allowing creativity and what we were meant to bring about in this life to flow through us.

When we experience a temporary imbalance in our lifestyle, find ourselves worn out and scattered, or lose our ability to feel joy, we should examine what is driving us.

Are we so mindlessly involved in the tasks of everyday life that we have no time to appreciate what we have?

Completely focused on doing, acquiring, getting ahead, or being successful?

Could we be fueled by Unconscious Influences* that drive us?

Are we are always doing – with no time for just being or enjoying the fruits of our successes?

Finding Balance While Growing, Shifting, and Changing

Personal growth causes us to shift and change We start to connect to our True Self. We develop towards becoming our Best Self. While welcoming these necessary changes, we must be cognizant of maintaining balance in our life.

As our life changes, we may take on a new and different endeavor that would require more energetic output. Or, we may become way less busy and not know what to do with ourselves.

Either of these scenarios can cause us to feel off-balance. This is usually temporary. Returning to a state of equilibrium is healthy – emotionally, spiritually, and physically. And it is required to becoming our Best Self.

The optimal point of balance will be different for everyone. Some people go through personal growth and its change effortlessly, others find it difficult and may become unbalanced. Some people will always work hard as it energizes them; others need regular relaxation time to stay energized.

Finding Balance While Being Open

While opening ourselves up to others and being accepting of them and their attitudes is part of personal growth and understanding, we must ensure that our own energetic bodies are not adversely affected by other peoples’ energetic outputs.

As we evolve and raise our vibrations we are also sensitized energetically. Being around people with negative attitudes or different energetic levels than ours can drain or stress us, and we may begin to feel fatigued, agitated, or energetically flattened.

We are all somewhat misaligned from Source and our True Self. Those of us working on personal growth are addressing this. Many are not. And that is ok.

We are all becoming more conscious at our own pace and on our own timeline. Part of being evolved is understanding this. As is not judging others for where they are on their journey. Still, we have to protect our progress.

As we work through the layers of our emotional world and address any misalignments we may have held, the manifestations of others’ misalignments may actually bother us more than before – just like a smoker who has quit is more sensitive to being around smokers.

So, in our desire to help others we must ensure we do not lose ourselves in their dramas or allow their negative energy to affect us.

Taking the time to investigate the real reason for imbalances in our life can help us avert continuing in a direction that will completely deflate us and ultimately not serve our best interests.

We must remember to:

Take time to just be – in the nothingness.

Being present in whatever we are doing.

Staying in our heart-space. Keeping an open heart.

Engage in activities that bring us joy.

Keep up the practices we chose to help us along this journey to peace.

We must be cognizant of:

The openness necessary for personal growth may invite people into our sphere who drain us energetically.

And as we open our heart-space intense passions may arise that cause us to lose our equilibrium.

We must be mindful of keeping our energetic balance.

Society still endorses the mind over the heart – that the right brain and its creativity should be at the beck and call of the mind.

This is changing, but there is much resistance to the heart-space being important as it not yet widely recognized that there is more power and knowledge when we tap into our hearts than in our minds.

The energy that creates universes is held within our hearts. And we tap into this more easily the more we practice just being.

*Unconscious Influences: Thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas based on past emotional impressions that we unconsciously constructed or appropriated from others. or from past situations. These may have come from our familial, generational, cultural, and/or social backgrounds. These misperceptions are held within our Emotional Bodies and create misperceptions about current situations. They cause us to react inappropriately to situations from neediness, past hurts, or unmet expectations.

Our perceptions and beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us stem from our inherent personalities, filtered through past and current influences: familial, generational, cultural, and social.

The perceptions and beliefs we hold can be based on truths, or they can be false and based on Unconscious Influences* we unknowingly hold. *(definition below).

The tendency to allow false perceptions to be created has its roots in Humanity’s past, which we perpetrated without knowing we were doing so.

All of our conscious and Unconscious Influences work together like threads in a patchwork quilt that link the interweaving patterns of how we deal with life—like a matrix that overlays our lives. I call this our Life Matrix.

Our Life Matrix: Is the lens through which we see and navigate the world. Fueled by our heart beliefs, which come from our conscious and Unconscious Influences, our Life Matrix holds all of our underlying perceptions and misperceptions. It supports what we think we need to be and what we think we need to do to be happy, fulfilled, empowered, and to have harmonious relationships. It upholds all of our perceptions—whether they are real or false.

Our Life Matrix can bring about positive or negative experiences for us. We usually develop a dominant Life Matrix, but since living is an organic ebb and flow of thoughts and emotions, we may vacillate between the positive and negative influences of both forces.

If something causes us to react out of character, our heart beliefs cause us to quickly revert to our normal attitudes.

Our Life Matrix will predispose us to deal with life, others, issues, and situations by denying, procrastinating, responding calmly, or by reacting aggressively or passively.

A Positive Life Matrix

Living under the influence of a positive Life Matrix, we may embody optimism, confidence, and hopefulness. We may feel lucky, be fearless, as well as be accepting of others since a positive outlook and our own self-confidence cause us to be non-judgmental.

We could sometimes succumb to arrogance, impatience, or single-mindedness as our personality dictates, but emotional reactions will generally be composed.

Most of our dealings with others will likely be propelled by responses instead of reactions. And as our general outlook is positive, we will quickly return to positive attitudes should we fall into negative ones.

A positive Life Matrix may temporarily shift to a negative one, but we are usually pulled back as our underlying inner belief system holds a positive approach to life.

The same holds true for a negative Life Matrix. We may have times of positivity, but we generally default to the negative. A negative Life Matrix can be shifted more permanently to the positive, albeit with a sincere and conscious effort.

A Negative Life Matrix

If we are living under the influence of a negative Life Matrix, we are often needy. We may tend to be pessimistic, hesitant, doubtful, and feel disadvantaged.

As these attitudes do not invite in desired results we are often frustrated. We blame others for our failures. We may act with aggression, timidity, or passive-aggressiveness, or, vacillate between these ways of dealing with our frustrations.

When we do evoke positive feelings they are usually undermined, as our negative heart beliefs eventually pull us back under their influence.

We may hold a volatile emotional component and will be overtly reactive—instead of being responsive to situations and taking them at face value and without making it all about us and our neediness and/or emotions.

Or, we may respond with seeming passivity, but are internalizing our angers or frustrations keeping our inner world in turmoil. This becomes a vicious cycle, as inner turmoil invites in more of the same.

Our emotional state is very important because it defines who we are now being, which influences what our future holds.

It has only been in the last century or so that psychologists have been able to connect the dots between our Unconscious Influences. and how we experience life.

We often feel that we do not experience enough love in our lives; however, our capacity to truly feel love and to love others is in direct relationship to what is held in our Life Matrix.

Working to create a positive Life Matrix creates self-love and brings love into our life.

To become the cause of our experiences and the creator of our realities—instead of at the effect of negative Unconscious Influences, we must be cognizant of the vibrations we are emitting.

The conscious and unconscious beliefs and life philosophies within our Life Matrix govern everything we think, say, and do and thereby what we invite into our life.

The lens through which we view others and the world around us is how the world will show up for us. We become what we think we are, and we create based on what is held in our Life Matrix.

*Our Unconscious Influences: Our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas based on past emotional impressions that we unconsciously constructed or appropriated from others, or from past situations. These may have created true positive perceptions about ourselves, others, situations, or the world around us. Or, they may have created negative false misperceptions that have us see ourselves and others through false lenses of separation and division.